The Earlham Road Project

Fiction, collaboration, disgust

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Adventures in the Golden Triangle

I suppose you want to know who I am and why I’m writing this, but that will have to wait for another time. For there are more pressing things at hand, and I cannot divert my attention into the sheer placidity and dopy literariness of areas like biography and plot and a character’s motivation. Movement, that’s what it’s all about.

All I can tell you is I stole a car. A powdery green number, from Mill Hill Road. Keys were in the ignition, dumbly, so I just climbed in and offed I went. The look on some drivers’ faces as you plough through the neat front gardens, avoiding traffic as you do so, is something to behold. If I could read lips I would have been offended, no doubt. Their red piggish faces crouched over the wheel miming expletives at me who didn’t care.

I never knew what ‘bling’ meant, and, in a way, I still don’t. I met a kid, kicking a ball on the side of the road, real snotnosed like, and he told me it was something to do with rappers and their cars. Doesn’t make much sense to me. I stole his ball and kicked it in the river. I would have cried if I was him, but he didn’t, and said he had stolen it from someone else and what goes around comes around.

Little Prick. The car starts to wobble, which could have been caused by the wall I demolished back there around the corner. Minis can’t take much punishment, it seems. The back wheel goes flying off and flips forward, bouncing on the bonnet, before rolling down the road, a slight quiver in its movement, and rolling across the junction with the Unthank Road, nimbly cutting between traffic and rolling up the hill slightly on the other side before tipping over at the kerb.

I watch this, transfixed by the unusualness of the scene, while the car careens into a wall. I keep my focus on the departing rear wheel, oblivious to the damage I’m causing to the car and wall.

I’m hungry, so walk to the shop and buy a pasty, then walk to the station to get the train back to London, where I’m due in Hoxton in the evening for the opening of my exhibition.

When I first met Ravique, she drank coffee hard like an addict, and swept her dark hair back across her face as she talked fast about everything on her mind. She chewed up topics and spat them out. She moved me.

Then she got into conceptual art hijinks, selling the empty contents of jars that weren’t there to media folk who weren’t there either. It made me laugh; it made her money. I wanted in, she wanted out. We swapped our identities and I claimed to be Ravique. No one raised an eyebrow. I didn’t even change my appearance, just swept my blond hair across my face as I talked hard and fast about everything under the sun.

She left London and moved to a small island in the Pacific, where she’s become a teacher of kung-po, or something like that. Sometimes she sends me leaves through the post, with my address and a stamp on one side and on the other side the word ‘beautiful’ written as many times as she can fit it. I think she’s finally found herself.

So anyway, on the way through Ipswich tunnel I think back to the graveyard I was smoking that bag of shit in, and I swear the monument next to me moved, although I can’t confirm it as I was fucked at the time, and by the time I realised it moved I was in the Ipswich tunnel. Someone should check to confirm it. Or not.

Beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful. Manningtree. Beautiful. Colchester. Beautiful. Liverpool Street. Beautiful. Old Street. Beautiful. Hoxton.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Out For a Stroll by Kenny Stetson

Rolling along out across the entrance way passing gas, through the sliding doors of the hospital. The daylight dazzled me. While lifting a hand to shield my eyes, I rolled towards the 15 steps next to the wheelchair ramp. Severely bruised, and having banged my head on the pavement, I struggled to stand up unassisted by pulling myself up on the handrail. The midday sun shone onto my battered skull. Finally, I regained my balance and limped down the street, one slipper missing, conscious of my sad appearance. But the limping meant nothing, everybody limps from time to time. I felt distantly relieved at my successful escape from the clinic, although the sun was still seriously messing up my vision. No more fat nurses or dioxide dinners with the old white cancer man.

As I shambled along the sidewalk, a figure emerged from a doorway somewhere in the wall ahead of me. I heard the drumming sound of a lady’s shoes tapping over the concrete. The harsh click-clacking was still echoing inside my skull as I burst into a fit of coughing, spewing phlegm. An indistinct figure, silhouetted against the light, she moved across the street through the wavering heat. A growing dark shape, like the shadow of a person approaching a source of light. The force of a renewed bout of coughing took control of me - I trembled. Too late, my eyes acknowledged that she was a shower of black arrows, flying towards me out of the haze. Struggling to avoid the barrage, I stepped on the tip of my gown. As I fell headlong onto the pavement, I felt the stinging pain of low flying arrows piercing my back. The sensation grew worse, until it felt like a fizzy building collapsing on top of me, for about ten seconds.

At that moment the clicking heels suddenly grew fainter, and my coughing died down.

Coughing is natural; it keeps the phlegm from settling permanently inside the lung, where it would eventually cause irreparable damage. And never mind women. We live on the same planet, and women are alright, although an indefinite fatigue had long since collected around my efforts to communicate with them.

The row of cars was clearly a secret message from the professor. I threw two Linoquine pills into my foaming mouth and started down the sweltering street, shambling, my bathrobe without a belt, open at the front, my shrivelled member dangling.

Although the pain was acceptable, the shady entrance of a closed-down shop seemed irresistible as a good place to lie down for a rest. I entered the shade and crumpled in a pile of semi-dried vomit. A sour odour emanated as I broke the grey crust with my elbow.

As my head touched the floor, there was a loud snoring noise. I spat out two teeth and some bloody saliva and looked up – there was nothing. I fumbled around in my robe’s pocket to find more pills.

Being shot with a well-designed weapon is not necessarily a painful situation. Even less so a prolonged situation. Rather, the brain merely registers a foreign object. No more. This is the only discovery. I say this based on experience, and to explain my situation. I felt calm and peaceful. Blood squirted from my side. I am out shopping. Just as I am about to hand over the money for this stuff I have been saving up for for months, this thing hits me.
Who shot me?

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Big Vern, Author of “In the Graveyard…” (as told at Joe Kennedy)

“Baby, I can’t believe you put me in one of your stories!”

I was crouched underneath the windowsill, popping my head up from time to time to see if they were outside yet. Not yet, but soon.

“So sweet of you!”

Of course, it wasn’t her. She didn’t even drink coffee. I’d let that slatternly appearance deceive me, in that bar. Turns out she only smokes when she’s drinking, no, only when she’s drinking on special occasions. But I was trying to keep a low profile right now; tell her the truth and she’d be right out in the street, clicking her heels loudly.

“Shhh. They got sound detectors. That’s how they caught Vic, y’know.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Honey, this is all paranoia. Let’s go out tonight- it’s not right locking yourself up like this.”

“Paranoia? Is it nowt.” I said, mimicking one of my characters.

A car came down the street. I don’t know much about cars, but I know they’re cars when I see them. Pastel green. Two men sat in the front, wearing suits. She was still sitting at the computer, browsing for my work on the web, a bottle of sparkling water to her left. I should have gone with my instincts: the left handers are always the most trouble.

“I’ve got to vacuum. Petal’s coming over at three for tea, and she’s got a dust allergy.”

Dust allergy?

“Darling,” I said, fixing her with a masterful expression, “do you think you could leave that for today? Call Petal and tell her you’ve got flu.”

“I spoke to her on the phone twenty minutes ago, and I think I’d have told her then if I had flu.”

Scuppered.

The car had gone past, but I know they were just waiting for the moment.